I don’t exactly know how this story begins. One would think that my love for books began as a precocious child who first picked up words before she could learn to walk. That is not this story. I loved the outdoors when my family lived in Manila. I would play with my neighbors on the street connecting our houses. These were friendships filled with late 2000s nostalgia, sweaty afternoons, crushes blooming for the first time, make-believe wars and alliances. Friendships I’d come to miss when we moved back to Ormoc in 2009.
Grade 1 was tough. This year was wildly vivid for me. I would tell my classmates how our lessons in Colegio San Agustin were made comfortable with the presence of air conditioning and projectors, no match for Saint Paul’s electric fans and dusty chalkboards. Classmates made fun of me for speaking English all the time, as I completely lost my grasp of Bisaya. And as the daughter of the school director, kids would believe me to be a spy, whispering their misdeeds into my mother’s ear. When you’re a child, it’s much easier to think that everything about the situation was wrong and that all these factors were out of your control.
In Grade 2, my mother went through all of my assignments to see if I did them. I missed a few exercises in my English book, and my teacher had marked them red. This was not the only subject. My father would then sit us down every night and have us read at least 10 pages in addition to homework. I took it as a challenge and found 10 pages quite easy to achieve. 10 pages became 20. 20 became 30. And I don’t know the exact moment we started buying books. When we lived in Manila, we often frequented the Fully Booked in BGC. It was pretty near to Krispy Kreme. The titles slip my mind, though I do know for sure that I was not yet looking at novels, just picture books. The biggest perk of this book store was that we could read the books on the carpeted floor. I’d find some quiet corner and just stay there, until the moment my parents picked up me and my sisters.
Our choices were pretty limited in Ormoc. We either had to go to Robinsons Tacloban for National Bookstore or Ayala Cebu for Fully Booked. The added barriers of distance and cost meant that time allocated for sitting down and reading was a resource stretched thin. We began buying in bulk. Mom would say 3 books each--as we had different tastes. But then my twin and I would conspire and pick out a book we could share, and before you know it, we’re checking out 11 books at the cashier.
One of my first loves was Harry Potter. Weirdly enough, I read all seven books on PDFs on my dad’s first generation iPad. The PDFs were downloaded from sketchy sites, because I remember spotting inconsistencies in spacing, lots of Chinese characters sandwiched between sentences, and more. I pretty much got the gist of it. I finished the series in six months. I reread them again. Finished in three this time round. This magical world of kids my age, battling villains with xenophobic tendencies amazed me and took me away from everything socially overstimulating or too strange for me to grasp. Yes, I could better understand giant snakes hidden underneath bathrooms, teleportation through fireplaces, sports on flying brooms, than the 30 other kids in the four walls of my classroom. Recess was not spent entirely with my nose in a book. I still tried to get along with the others through chinese garter, cross magellan, trading chuckie for mik-mik, jackstones, and whispering about which boys were the cutest and why. It just so happened that I felt more at home with fantasy than the politics of the playground.
Eventually, around grade 5 and grade 6, reading became cool. My books were in high demand. I started keeping a list of people who were currently borrowing books and people who wanted to borrow books. Chains of people pined after Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians series. To date, I have 18 books from this author, all spanning a variety of mythology from different cultures, namely Egyptian and Norse. I travelled to other countries through the adventures of these protagonists, saw countless horizons and vistas through their eyes. I was with them, running away from evil terrorist organisations threatening to end the world. I felt their pain, their sorrow, their triumph, their frustration. I watched them grow as warriors, as friends, as lovers. I learned about trust and betrayal. Little moments slowed down, focusing on sunrays and the glint of someone’s eyes. Weeks gone by, maybe even years, between prologues and first chapters, final goodbyes as teenagers and visiting graves during their final years. Time made no sense in these pages, but their significance made sense to me. I have lived thousands of lifetimes through these pages. I sometimes feel older than those around me.
The summer of 2019 I was getting ready to leave for UWC in Singapore. This break lasted four months. It was a frustrating transition, I felt stuck in limbo between Ormoc and Tampines. My sisters and friends were in school and I was passing the time, waiting for the days until my flight. That summer I reread The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho for the third time. At this point, I was getting tired of high school dramas (Dork Diaries), post apocalyptic dystopian societies (Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner), and love triangles (To All the Boys I Loved Before). The archetypes, tropes, and plotlines blurred in my mind to form this monolithic, eurocentric idea of what the teenage experience is. True, it’s a messy process, but I was still looking for more. After The Alchemist, I inhaled Coelho’s other works, narratives that transformed the way I viewed love, spirituality, and purpose. I swallowed Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, as well as And the Mountains Echoed, and my heart ached for the women and ethnic minorities of Afghanistan through turbulent eras. I delved into stoicism by absorbing Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. The universe inside of me expanded to include more worlds, more voices. In a way, it was to escape the difficulties of the real world. But it was also to prepare me for the diversity of thoughts and backgrounds I would soon encounter in a new international school.
I took up Higher Level English Language and Literature in the International Baccalaureate. I walked into that classroom with the confidence of someone who wrote great essays and consistently got good grades in English from a Philippine Education. I was mistaken on several occasions. I had much to learn and understand. With how rigorous and mentally challenging the IB was, I read less books. However, I read more intentionally. I was discovering authors way out of my radar, in genres I never step foot in. Again, the universe was expanding, yet this time, observation was not the only action taken. In my LangLit class we questioned everything, broke it down: looked at pop culture and memes; themes of feminism, class divides, race; the macro and micro. My brain hurt a lot, now just thinking about how much thought (a one hour discussion) went into analysing a scene (2-3 pages) from the Handmaid’s Tale.
I finished the IB with a 6 (on a scale of 1-7) in English LangLit. My teacher called me ‘the artist who felt so intensely about the world’ on the back of a bookmark she gave me in our last class. So thank you, mom and dad, for allowing me to be an explorer of worlds.
Much love and light,
Amanda
18 September 2021
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